I felt sick and unhappy. I remembered Fagin with his leather notebook, reading out the different names and addresses in Moscow. Why had I made this choice?
Once again, and for the first time in a very long while, I thought about escape. I knew what the stakes were. If I tried and failed, I would die. But one way or another, this had to end.
I had just one advantage. By now I knew everything about the dacha and that included all the security arrangements. I took out one of the exercise books that Nigel Brown had given me – it was full of English vocabulary – and turned to an empty page at the back. Then, using a pencil, I drew a sketch of the compound and, resting it on my knees, I began to consider the best way out.
There wasn’t one.
CCTV cameras covered every inch of the gardens. Climbing the wall was impossible. Quite apart from the razor wire, there were sensors buried under the lawn and they would register my footfall before I got close. Could I approach one of the guards? No. They were all far too afraid of Sharkovsky. What about his wife, Maya? Could I somehow persuade her to take me on one of her shopping trips to Moscow? It was a ridiculous idea. She had no reason to help me.
Even if I did miraculously make it to the other side, what was I to do next? I was surrounded by countryside – the Silver Forest – with no idea of how near I was to the nearest bus stop or station. If I made it to Moscow, I could go back to Tverskaya Street. I had no doubt that Dima would hide me… assuming he was still there. But Sharkovsky would use all his police and underworld contacts to hunt me down. It wouldn’t bother him that he had been keeping me a prisoner for three years and he had treated me in a way that was certainly illegal. It was just that we had made a deal and he would make sure I kept it. I worked for him or I was dead.
For the next few weeks, everything went on as before. I cleaned, I washed, I bowed, I scraped. But for me, nothing was the same. I could hardly bear to be in the same room as Sharkovsky. Tasting his food made me physically sick. This was the man responsible for what had happened to Estrov, the unnamed investor my parents had been complaining about the night before they died. If I couldn’t escape from him, I would go mad. I would kill him or I would kill myself. I simply couldn’t stay here any more.
I had hidden the exercise book under my mattress and every night I took it out and jotted down my thoughts. Slowly, I realized that I had been right from the very start. There was only one way out of this place – and that was the Bell JetRanger helicopter. I turned to a new page and wrote down the name of the pilot, Arkady Zelin, then underlined it twice. What did I know about him? How could I persuade him to take me out of here? Did he have any weaknesses, anything I could exploit?
We had known each other for three years but I wouldn’t say we were friends. Zelin was a very solitary person, often preferring to eat alone. Even so, it was impossible to live in such close confinement without giving things away and the fact was that we did talk to each other, particularly when we were playing cards. Zelin liked the fact that I was interested in helicopters. He’d even let me examine the workings of the engine once or twice, when he was stripping it down for general maintenance, although he had drawn the line at allowing me to sit in the cockpit. The security guards wouldn’t have been happy about that. And then there was Nigel Brown. He knew a bit about Zelin too and when he’d had a few drinks he would share it with me.
Arkady Zelin
Soviet Air Force. Gambling?
Saratov.
Wife? Son.
Skiing… France/Switzerland. Retire?
This was about the total knowledge that I had of the man who might fly me out of the dacha. I wrote it down in my exercise book and stared at the useless words, sitting there on the empty page.
What did they add up to?
Zelin had been in the Soviet Air Force but he’d been caught stealing money from a friend. There had been a court martial and he had been forced to leave. He was still bitter about the whole thing and claimed that he was innocent, that he had been set up, but the truth was he was always broke. It was possible that he was addicted to gambling. I often saw him looking at the racing pages in the newspapers and once or twice I heard him making bets over the phone.
Zelin owned a crummy flat in the city of Saratov, on the Volga River, but he hardly ever went there. He had three weeks’ holiday a year – he often complained it wasn’t enough – and he liked to travel abroad, to Switzerland or France in the winter. He loved skiing. He once told me that he would like to work in a ski resort and had talked briefly about heli-skiing – flying rich people to the top of glaciers and watching them ski down. He had been married and he carried a photograph in his wallet… a boy who was about eleven or twelve years old, presumably his son. I remembered the day when I had come into the recreation room with a huge bruise on my face. I’d made a bad job of polishing the silver and Josef had lost control and almost knocked me out. Zelin had seen me and although he had said nothing, I could tell he was shocked. Perhaps I could appeal to him as a father? On the other hand, he never spoke about his son… or his wife, for that matter. He never saw either of them; perhaps they had cut him out of their life. He was quite lonely. He was the sort of person who looks after number one simply because there is nobody else.
I could have scribbled until I had filled the entire exercise book but it wasn’t going to help very much. Sharkovsky had a number of trips abroad that summer and each time he left in the helicopter, I would stop whatever I was doing and watch the machine rise from the launch pad and hover over the trees before disappearing into the sky. I had nothing I could offer – no money, no bribe. I knew that there was no way Zelin was going to fall out with his employer. In the end I forgot about him and began to think of other plans.
We came to the end of another summer and I swore to myself that it would be my last at the dacha, that by Christmas I would be gone. And yet August bled into September and nothing changed. I was feeling sick and angry with myself. No only had I not escaped, I hadn’t even tried. Worse still, Ivan Sharkovsky had returned. He had left Harrow by now and was on his way to Oxford University. Presumably his father had offered to pay for a new library or a swimming pool because I’m not sure there was any other way he’d have got in.
I was in the garden when I first saw him, pushing a wheelbarrow full of leaves, taking it down to the compost heap. Suddenly he was standing there in front of me, blocking my path. Age had not improved him. He was still overweight. We were both about the same height but he was much heavier than me. I stopped at once and bowed my head.
“Yassen!” he said, spitting out the two syllables in a sing-song voice. “Are you glad to see me?”
“Yes, sir,” I lied.
“Still slaving for my dad?”
“Yes, sir.”
He smirked at me. Then he reached down and picked up a handful of filthy leaves from the wheelbarrow. I was wearing a tracksuit and, very deliberately, he shoved the leaves down the front of my chest. Then he laughed and walked away.
From that moment on, there was a new, very disturbing edge to his behaviour. His attacks on me became more physical. If he was angry with me, he would slap me or punch me, which was something he had never done before. Once, at the dinner table, I spilt some of his wine and he picked up a fork and jabbed it into my thigh. His father saw this but said nothing. In a way, the two of them were equally mad. I was afraid that Ivan wouldn’t be satisfied until I was dead.
That was the month that Nigel Brown was fired. He wasn’t particularly surprised. He was no longer tutoring Ivan, and his sister, Svetlana, had been accepted into Cheltenham Ladies’ College in England so there was nothing left for him to do. Mr Brown was sixty by now and his teaching days were over. He talked about going back to Norfolk but he didn’t seem to have any fondness for the place. It’s often interested me how some people can follow a single path through life that takes them to somewhere they don’t want to be. It was hard to believe that this crumpled old man with his vodka and his tweed jacket had once been a child, full of hopes and dreams. Was this what he had been born to be?